WiMAX

As a person who commutes semi-regularly between Connecticut and Boston and DC, I never fly. I either drive or take the train so I can work while commuting. One of the challenges the airlines have is the productivity loss of security, shoe removal, etc. Then there is the typical wait when flights are delayed, the cramped seats, etc.

A Phoenix rising from the ashes -- not sure this is the appropriate image but it sure is colorful

A few people have asked me recently to throw my hat in the ring about the health of VoIP. Many bloggers have been eulogizing the technology while I was on vacation - ironically using more VoIP than I ever have.

Objectivity is the subject of today's thoughts - primarily because I came across a pretty harsh criticism of me being biased towards a particular vendor. I was going to link to the posts where an anonymous individual decided to skewer me but I then realized that the poster could be a short seller of the stock of the company in question or perhaps a disgruntled former or present employee.

Seldom, I do get criticism from people saying I am biased towards or against companies. They say I brownnose or they say I am in the pocket of this company or that.

Did you ever search for an available WiFi AP only to be confronted with "Free Public WiFi" as the SSID? After clicking on this network did you find you don't get internet access? Well if this has happened to you -- and it has happened to me, you want to check out this article which explains how Microsoft's ad-hoc network setttings and the irresistable idea of getting free WiFi combine to spread an SSID which causes lots of wasted time.

The good news is if we all stop clicking on this SSID, it will eventually go away. You know, like when your teachers told you you had to learn the metric system and you ignored them and after a few years they forgot.

One of the most fascinating articles I have read in a long while is about the Siemens global bribery scandal where the company spent $1.4 billion on bribes from 2001 to 2007. Of that, get this - telecom accounted for $800 million or 57%! Consider the company also had divisions in industrial, transportation, control systems, healthcare and other areas and you see just how out of whack the telecom bribery spending was.

Nortel is an interesting company from the perspective that they have an inherent advantage in their product development as they cater to two separate markets - enterprise and carrier, which need similar products. The company can afford to easily sell carrier-class products to enterprise customers making them more reliable than what many competitors offer.

But all the advantages in the world don't mask the company's recent earnings which were below expectations with carrier revenue down 24% and they certainly can't easily offset the billions of dollars of debt the company has.

I asked about the WiMAX/LTE competition and he said for his company, WiMAX was always a bridge technology towards LTE but today it seems carriers have stepped up their roll outs of LTE technology. "Now the gap is closing," he said. He continued, "I would have thought we would have more WiMAX deployments by now and I don't see it."
My take? LTE does have the inherent advantage of being provided by the equipment companies the carriers are familiar with and moreover it has the advantage of copying the best of WiMAX.

One of the most charismatic and energetic people in the carrier equipment market has to be Harold Braun (interview) the CEO of Harris Stratex, the largest independent supplier of wireless transmission systems in the world. The company supports broad frequency coverage from 4-38 GHz and capacities up to 1.2 Gbps. Their product lines consist of the TRuepont, Eclipse and Constellation among others.

I recently had a chance to catch up with this globe-trotting CEO and he was quite happy as he told me the market for mobile backhaul is growing at 6-8% and when you look more closely you see the majority of this growth is in IP.

More calls, more CEOs, more problems. There seem to be more and more companies coming out of the woodwork who now realize they need to focus on sales and marketing in 2009 for their survival. It seems these companies founded themselves for the sole purpose of being sold to Cisco and other solid companies and now those dreams have slowed or in some cases vanished.

Yes, the big tech companies are still purchasing but if they don't pick you up now, there are limited opportunities for future funding.

I get these calls and all I can think is "You're waiting until the middle of the recession to start thinking about how you get customers?" I could say more but the sheer lunacy of the whole situation doesn't allow me to articulate without peppering my writing with obscenities.

For those of us in telecom and tech, there is obvious concern about where the economy is headed - just like any other industry. The difference for us is we have seen a recent bubble burst and don't have the excess in our markets which other markets do. In fact in 2000, the dotcom bubble burst in March and the telecom bubble in November.

Most CEOs I speak with in our industry tell me tech and communications are among the best industries to be in for 2009 and beyond.